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Last updated in July 2022.

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Francisco Yirá Albornoz

Data scientist and economist

Data scientist, bachelor of economics, and highly skilled R programmer. I have experience using machine learning to solve business problems in retail and marketing/CRM, answering business questions through statistical modelling and causal inference, and automating processes and reports.

I am passionate about enabling data-driven decision making and use data to solve problems and generate social impact. I like challenges and I am eager to learn more and share knowledge with others

Formal Education

University of Chile, Faculty of Economics and Business

Diploma in Applied Econometrics

Santiago, Chile

2021 - 2020

10-month program covering experimental design, causal inference with observational data and time series analysis.

Pontifical Catholic University of Chile, Faculty of Engineering

Diploma in Big Data

Santiago, Chile

2018 - 2017

144-hour program covering the fundamentals of machine learning, recommender systems, Hadoop, parallel computing and graph theory.

University of Chile, Faculty of Economics and Business

B.S. in Economics

Santiago Chile

2015 - 2010

Graduated with distinction. 5-year program.

Professional Experience

Data Scientist, Marketing

WOM S.A. (Telecommunications)

Santiago, Chile

2021 - 2020

  • Used interpretable modeling techniques and unsupervised learning to guide the prioritisation of network infrastructure deployments. The resulting insights were made available to stakeholders via interactive reports, using packages such as flexdashboard and plotly.
  • Trained predictive models with the ML framework H2O to better target potential customers through call centre campaigns.
  • Performed impact evaluations of network investments using A/B testing, differences in differences, and matching.

Data Scientist, Marketing

Walmart (Retail)

Santiago, Chile

2019 - 2018

  • Developed data transformation processes and implemented machine learning models that allowed the deployment of a personalized marketing strategy for the company’s most important local brand. This included the development of churn models and clustering on transactional data.
  • Led the development of an internal R package aimed at streamlining processes and accelerating deliveries in our area.
  • Led the impact evaluation of the personalised marketing project by designing, implementing, and supervising A/B tests, in close collaboration with the CRM Ops team.

Data Analyst, Marketing

Walmart (Retail)

Santiago, Chile

2018 - 2017

  • Gave answers to business questions from Walmart merchants and the marketing team by integrating multiple data sources with R and SQL, and by applying statistical modelling, econometrics and data visualisation techniques.
  • Automated ad-hoc reports by using parametrised R Markdown documents.
  • Improved the impact evaluation of key company decisions by incorporating causal inference methodologies in otherwise descriptive analyses.

Trainee, Public Sector Sales team

Oracle (Software and IT)

Santiago, Chile

2017 - 2015

  • Supported my sales team by automating reports with VBA.
  • Kept track of sales opportunities KPIs.
  • Demoed Oracle products to government clients.
  • Developed a market study about innovative ways to sell Oracle products.

Projects and additonal coursework

Shiny app deployed on AWS tracking the Twitter presence of Chilean constituents

Self-learning project

N/A

2022

  • An app built with R’s shiny and deployed to AWS EC2 that automatically retrieves and visualises the most liked and RT’d tweets from the Chilean politicians who drafted the 2022 constitution proposal.

Causal Inference with R (blog posts series)

Self-learning project

N/A

2022

  • A series of articles in which I explain key causal inference concepts and methodologies in simple terms and with lots of code examples and visualisations.

Analysing my music collection with Python and R

Self-learning project

N/A

2021

  • An analysis I did to practice Python skills. It involved importing and transforming XML data and performing data wrangling and visualisation.
  • I also combined Python and R code through the reticulate package to leverage the R visualisation capabilities on top of the pandas data pipeline.

Data collection for a survey of higher education institutions

Ministry of Education, Chilean government

Santiago, Chile

2020

  • Developed R scripts to automatically create custom forms for each higher education institution, and then consolidated the completed forms into a single dataset by using Python scripts.

BI Dashboards development

KMA Asset (Real estate investment trust)

Santiago, Chile

2017

  • Developed R scripts to automatically consolidate data from multiple CRM sources.
  • Developed dashboards in Power BI on top of that data to enable analysis and monitoring of business metrics (conversion KPIs, customer acquisition cost, etc).

Publications and Presentations

alicer: An internal R package to accelerate Walmart Chile analytics

LatinR: Latin American Conference on the Use of R in Research + Development.

N/A

2019

Presentation on our success case at Walmart developing R packages to accelerate workflows in the marketing analytics team.

Have America’s political parties lost control over their presidential nominations? (Spanish)

University of Chile’s academic repository.

N/A

2017

Undergraduate thesis for Economics major. A statistical analysis of the factors that drive presidential nominations in the US political system, expanding on ’The Party Decides’ (M. Cohen, 2008) by leveraging new data and the Chow structural break test.

Languages

English

Fluent. IELTS Band 8.0.

N/A

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Spanish

Native speaker.

N/A

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French

Basic user (A2).

N/A

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